There’s a name for it now in American film and literature, the Black equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: It’s the Magical Negro, the Black character who exists exclusively to make whites feel good about themselves. You see the character in so many movies or books about Blacks made by whites, for whites, to celebrate the virtues and greatness of whiteness, as with “Mississippi Burning,” “Green Book,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and of course Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
We now have the Magical Negro elevated to an entire curriculum. It’s Florida’s African American History standards. The state Board of Education approved them this week, along with standards for 10 other disciplines. Suddenly combusting ulcers kept me from getting past the African-American ones. You can hardly do better as Exhibit A in a graduate course on critical race theory, vindicating the late Derrick Bell enough to have a chair endowed for him at New College. We’re a sick puppy of a society, or at least a state: let’s not blame America for Florida Man, here in full.
The standards are an excellent illustration of what American history looks like through white eyes, and how whites are the best thing that ever happened to Black people, who apparently should worship the Middle Passage down the chains of their ancestry.
As history of course, the standards are a cracker festival of fantasy and chest-thumping. The history is often inaccurate, when it’s not obscene. But this is what we’ve come to in Florida’s Second Coming of Jim Crow, where Black Codes have been colorized into voting restrictions as elegies to integrity, where the poll tax has returned to hound ex-cons despite a constitutional amendment that supposedly restored their civil rights, where book bans and the overt prohibition on frank discussions of racism in schools and universities pose as academic something in Free Florida. Now we have racism codified in history standards.
The headlines have rightly focused on one obscenity in particular: the suggestion that if it weren’t for slavery, Blacks wouldn’t have learned all those terrific skills like “painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service.” I’m not making this up. In what the standards call a “benchmark clarification,” they specify that “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” I’m sure enslaved persons could slip in a little bit of personal time between the slave auctions, the 16 hours in the fields, the whippings, the rapes, the extra-judicial murders.
Necessary but rare nods to atrocities aside, these standards are framed in their totality as one big success story that highlights all the great things whites did for Blacks. They never mention white supremacy or its damning association with Christianity, in effect excusing it by omission. Instead, the standards resort to a form of cynical relativism that makes American slavery nothing more ordinary than the slave systems that existed in Africa or in Muslim slave markets. This is the stuff of Internet revisionism by white nationalists elevated to academic standards.
Some examples drawn directly from the standards:
- “Examine the Underground Railroad and how former slaves partnered with other free people and groups in assisting those escaping from slavery.” Translation: look what whites people did for you.
- “Identify Afro-Eurasian trade routes and methods prior to the development of the Atlantic slave trade.” Translation: Don’t blame whites, everyone else did it.
- “Instruction includes how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.” Translation: See above.
- “Describe the contact of European explorers with systematic slave trading in Africa.” Translation: Blame it on Africans.
- “Instruction includes the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery.” Translation: Aren’t you lucky you were in the Hammock instead of Siberia?
- Instruction includes the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries. Translation: Fucking Arabs.
- “Examine the experiences and contributions of African Americans in early Florida.” Translation: Live, shop, play!
- “Instruction includes the Society of Friends (Quakers) and their efforts to end slavery throughout the United States.” Translation: Don’t blame Christians.
- “Instruction includes what made indentured servitude contracts a risky investment for colonists, based on economic and social factors.” Translation: Slavery was risk-free.
- “Instruction includes the transition from an indentured to a slave-based economy.” Translation: Capitalism at its finest.
The standards require instruction on writings by “Africans living in the United States,” as if Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were aliens as opposed to Americans denied their rights. It refers to race massacres such as Ocoee and Rosewood in Florida as violence “perpetrated against and by African Americans,” again creating the false equivalence that echoes to this day in blaming the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a wonder the standards don’t portray Sally Hemings as a seductress doing her part for the birthing of Thomas Jefferson’s social conscience.
In these standards, slavery is taught exclusively as a neutral, economic system made necessary by the “desire for knowledge of land cultivation”–again, I’m not making this up– “and the rise in the production of tobacco and rice,” as opposed to how, say, “New Orleans became the Walmart of people selling” (in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s words), so a white aristocracy could croon about freedom and honor, and croon still about Southern gallantry.
But hey, the standards will “Examine economic developments of and for African Americans post-WWI, including the spending power and the development of black businesses and innovations” and “includes the impact of Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company,” because who really needs to read about the more than four thousand Black men, women and children murdered by lynching from the end of Reconstruction to 1950? We’ll learn about “the ramifications of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933-1945) on African Americans,” but not his refusal to sign an anti-lynching law. We’ll learn about “the effects of the election of African Americans to national office” but let’s not trouble with the kicking of Adam Clayton Powell out of Congress or the robbing of Muhammad Ali of his title.
There’s a sprinkling of the grimness of our racist past in the standards to be sure, but it has the feel of tokenism, a sort of reverse use of the Magical Negro to check off a few boxes and come out looking like the standards valiantly address the nation’s tragic failure. But that’s just it: the standards don’t see tragedy. They don’t see failure. They see a linear narrative that goes from few peculiar mistakes here and there to great triumph. No need to dwell on the grim. No need, really, to dwell on the past. These history standards have very little to do with history and very much to do with a recasting of myths as reality.
An entire system based on terrorism and repression is magically transformed into a sensitive evolution of a white supremacist culture that did so much to allow Blacks to find themselves and their tormentors to pat themselves on the back. Naturally, racism is over. Naturally, Free Florida is God’s gift to Blacks. This is history in the land of DeSantistan. Praise be, massa.
Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
Richard W. Lewis, Jr. says
Thanks Pierre for another excellent, outstanding article. Both of my parents were teachers in Michigan, my mom a fifth grade teacher, and my father a high school Special Education teacher. I can guarantee that both would either quit or go to jail if they were instructed to do what this moronic legislation does, let alone anything else that dip__it Desantis and his cronies have come up with.
Ellen Kincaid says
Even if the truth hurts, it’s still the truth.
Thank you, Pierre Tristam
JEK says
DeSatan needs to go away permanently. What a disgrace this is to teach our kids. Florida wake up please!
Anthony says
DeSatan as you call him, which fits him. His statement last week about slaves is outragous and once again he is showing our country he is not qualified to be in the White House let alone governor of any state in this country. It’s good the truth about him is finally coming out.
Justbob says
And the slave owners would surely help with the fine tuning of a slave’s resume highlighting all the skill sets gained from their experience as an inhuman piece of property.
Stephen says
Lets hit them where it hurts. If they want to make up Black history. I want to stop paying school taxes. Lets just have home schooling. Who will print made up history?
Nancy N. says
Desantis has just implemented a plan in the state that now allows every parent to homeschool or send their child to private school at state expense. We’ve been using the pilot version of the program, which was limited to special needs students, for years for our daughter. I’m now extra grateful to have that program as it means I can continue to educate my daughter with real history, outside the reach of the Desanistan whitewashed standards.
Jackson1955 says
Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Yet, some students are only just learning this today. This is partly because, after the war ended, some white southerners started organizations dedicated to promoting textbooks that taught that the war wasn’t about slavery, but rather about “states’ rights.” These false narratives continue to affect the way students are being taught Civil War history today.
I’m about sick of this. This overt, indignant attitude that Americans should just allow Republicans and their selective memory cohorts to steam roll anyone teaching about the REALNESS of slavery is just a fallacy. Heck yes, people should know about it. It’s part of this country’s dirty history. So funny they want people to whitewash slavery from history, but are quick to tell Black people “to go back to where they came from” the minute they feel a Black person has “stepped out of line”, by having the “nerve” to express disdain with racism in this country. You can’t have it both ways. And last time I checked, the only kind of people that wanted to avoid history are the ones who wish to repeat it. Not too long ago that last sentence would have been bizarre to make, but given the boldness of the so-called right, it’s become something crossing many minds considering the rate at which they are turning back the clock. And frankly, it sickens me.
Michael Cocchiola says
Florida is a racist state. The state’s overwhelming majority voted for DeSantis knowing who and what he is. And they liked all of it.
Some will deny this. Some will throw insults back. But, you really are what you stand up and cheer for. And Florida Republicans stand up and cheer for their racist governor.
Nancy N says
We should not excuse those who aren’t standing up and cheering, either, but who turn a blind eye to what is going on and vote Republican for what they claim are other reasons: finances, abortion, etc. Complacency is complicity. If you still give your support to the party while claiming to abhor things it supports, you are just as guilty.
Ed says
I don’t think a majority of white people are racist. I have read multiple articles that both align with Pierre and dispute his view of the curriculum. However, if he is more correct in his opinion than wrong we should all contact our legislators to correct the problem. I have hand written 3 letters expressing concern. Did you?
Most commentators posting her probably lived through the race riots of the 60’s. I trust we all hope it is history not to repeated. But the decisiveness of EVERYTHING is dangerous and I personally feel the use of “magical Negro” trope was overboard.
Just take a step back, process the informations/posts, maybe do a little more research before piously condemning anyone who doesn’t think like you do. I’m pretty sure every Republican is not racist, is not bigoted, is not a Nazi or anything else but a human. There must be a few good ones.
Nancy N. says
A few good Republicans? I suppose you think there were a few good Nazis too? Anyone who continues to support the party while all of these things are going on is condoning this behavior, not denouncing it. Silence is complicity. And as for “writing our legislators”, that just made me laugh out loud. They are nothing but DeSantis’s lap dogs…and he’s the one who ordered these curriculum changes in the first place. They are too busy congratulating him on the new standards to read your letter condemning them.
Ed says
Thanks for making my point. At least you didn’t call me a Nazi directly.
Tony Mack says
I recently saw the movie “Amistad.” I don’t think those captured Africans were thinking they would become blacksmiths or anything else as they were be tossed into the holds of those sailing ships. No way were they thinking they were being handed a golden opportunity as their families were being ripped apart, their relatives and neighbors slaughtered and their lives shattered. Now if DeSantis thinks this was okay, I’d invite him and his family to suffer the predation and humiliation those “slaves” suffered on their way to finding meaningful employment in America. He and his ilk would have been right at home in Germany in the Thirties and the mass extermination of the Jews: “Well, we did offer them a free train ride to the country, so what’s the problem?”
DoubleGator says
https://www.history.com/news/whipped-peter-slavery-photo-scourged-back-real-story-civil-war
Laurel says
I believe the vast majority of Americans are not going to let this happen. I also believe most of Floridians did not realize that the second term of DeSantis was ever going to be this crazy. He really showed his true colors this second, ridiculous time around.